Al Goldstein died last week.  Who was Al Goldstein?  Al Goldstein was the publisher of Screw, perhaps one of the most unabashedly pornographic magazines every produced in the United States.  As famous litigator Alan Dershowitz observed, "[Although] Hugh Hefner [publisher of Playboy] did it with taste, Goldstein's contribution was to be utterly tasteless."  Or as Goldstein himself put it, "We will be the Consumer Reports of sex."
     I've never read Screw, nor do I ever intend to.  So why do I mention Al Goldstein?  I mention him because as I read his obituary, I kept thinking  of how he spent his life, what he devoted his days to doing:  shocking and offending people with explicitly lurid and perverted depictions of sex.  Was this really the best use of his 77 years?  Not that sex isn't good or necessary for human perpetuation, enjoyment, and fulfillment, but surely it is not the most important thing about existence.
     "All is vanity," says the writer of Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity."  Indeed.  We all pursue useless and irremediable things; however, most of us are aware that they are in, the long run, exactly that:  not the most important things.  Maybe Al Goldstein knew he was pursuing vanity; maybe he never thought about it.  Maybe it was both.  Nonetheless, here he was, a highly creative mind, endowed with abundance and life, a person made in the image of God, devoted to something that will fade away the moment we cease breathing.
     Is this really why we are here?